


Some touch of pity

by gersaint



Category: 15th Century CE RPF, Henry VI - Shakespeare
Genre: Angst, Historical Inaccuracy, M/M, Religion, Tenderness, i can and WILL make ANY pairing angsty, the inherent homoeroticism of regicide, two plantagenets angsting in a prison cell five feet apart cuz theyre not gay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:02:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27924208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gersaint/pseuds/gersaint
Summary: Richard reached into his doublet to retrieve his dagger – and stopped. No. It was probably a special kind of sin to kill a man without even giving him time to react: he felt he had to say something, to announce his presence somehow, even if in the slightest and most perfunctory way. He opened his mouth to speak, but at that moment King Henry turned around and looked him straight in the eye.“I knew you would come,” said Henry, his voice soft and without a hint of reproach. “I knew it would be you.”
Relationships: Henry VI of England/Richard III of England
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4
Collections: Histories Ficathon XI





	Some touch of pity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [strikethesun](https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikethesun/gifts).



_Think’st thou I am an executioner?_

– Richard of Gloucester in _Henry VI part 3_

The night was gentle; the night was kind. It was the nearing the end of May, summer stealing in on soft wild feet, snapping branches and rustling in the sleeping thickets.

Richard’s dagger lay holstered and hidden inside the folds of his velvet doublet – which was padded with wool and linen to conceal the crook of his back, the arch of his shoulder, the too-harsh angles of his body.

In the distance, across the water, he could still hear the revelry of the victors: self-satisfied laughter rising and falling, bells ringing, flutes piping, tabors thrumming. If he turned he would be able to see the fires illuminating London’s gates and narrow streets, bidding King Edward welcome once again, once and forever.

But he did not turn.

Richard of Gloucester stared straight ahead into the gloom as the boat took him closer to the Tower of London, deeper into its heart as dark and unknowable as his own, farther away from the scant light of the moon and the midnight city. As the boat passed through an arched stone tunnel, the soft plashing of the oars against the water grew distorted and magnified into a devilish whispering, and Richard’s very thoughts seemed to echo inside his mind. He paid the sounds no attention. He kept his focus solely on the task ahead of him: the task that nobody had ordered him to carry out, the task he knew he would have to shoulder anyway.

He was only nineteen, and he was about to become a murderer.

Oh, he had killed men before, yes – but that had all been in the heat of battle, where the rules were different and where even the saints did not dare intervene. Not even if one called for them, as so many desperate men did. The saints preferred to turn away, to hide their faces in their ghostly hands at the sight of so much blood and flashing metal.

But now? Now Richard was on his way to kill an anointed king. For the good of his family and his house, for the prosperity and security of his brother’s reign, for all the realm of England. This is what he told himself. This is what he repeated to himself, silently, as his heartbeat thudded against the dagger beneath his doublet of dark red velvet.

He disembarked and paid the boatman. The coins jangled as Richard took them out, their metal surfaces gleaming faintly in the torchlight. King Edward’s face – impassive, regal, unreadable – was stamped on each coin.

Richard sauntered through corridors and tramped up staircases, his footsteps echoing harshly against the stones. Braziers filled with burning coals jutted from the walls, but their uncertain, flickering light and the long gaps between them somehow made the darkness even deeper. Richard’s shadow took on monstrous shapes as he passed by each brazier; it loomed like a beast of the night, seeming to take on an identity of its own quite apart from the young man whose movements it was bound to follow faithfully.

When he reached Wakefield Tower, the guards let him through without asking any questions. They knew his face – and though there had been no direct order from King Edward, they had known, since the news from Tewkesbury had first reached London, that it would only be a matter of time before the inevitable occurred.

The door opened without a creak. A beam of moonlight shone through the barred windows. The furnishings consisted simply of a writing desk and a bed. The room looked like a monk’s cell: one would not think that a royal prisoner was being held captive here. It almost made Richard sad.

Almost.

At the other end of the chamber was an alcove in which stood a small altar with a crucifix, illuminated by a single candle. The bars on the window behind the altar seemed specially built to keep the prisoner’s prayers from reaching the heavens. It was there that Richard found King Henry. The twice-deposed king was kneeling on the hard flagstones, hands clasped, eyes closed, his face serenely uplifted. He was wearing an old blue gown with threadbare dagged sleeves. Lost in prayer, he seemed completely unaware that he was no longer alone in the chamber.

Best to make it quick and painless, then.

Richard reached into his doublet to retrieve his dagger – and stopped. No. It was probably a special kind of sin to kill a man without even giving him time to react: he felt he had to say something, to announce his presence somehow, even if in the slightest and most perfunctory way. He opened his mouth to speak, but at that moment King Henry turned around and looked him straight in the eye.

“I knew you would come,” said Henry, his voice soft and without a hint of reproach. “I knew it would be you.”

For a moment Richard stared silently, unable to form any words. Then he remembered who he was – a son of York, a brother of the king, a man who had seen war and betrayal, who had wielded sword and shield, who was supposed to know no pity – and what he was here for. And his face set into the dark, hard expression that had become so familiar to him over the years.

“Aye,” he said. “Though all do wish it done, no one else would’ve taken it upon himself. And thus each man imagines his own hands will stay clean.”

“But you do not deceive yourself that yours will.”

Richard smiled mirthlessly. “No. I do not.”

He took out the dagger and unsheathed it.

“Now,” he said, “I am not one for lengthy speeches. I won’t ask your forgiveness, as I need none and can hope for none. I am doing this for my king, and that is all.” He paused. “If you wish to say a prayer –”

“Richard,” said Henry, almost whispering, “you truly think you’re irredeemable?”

Though Richard’s didn’t show it, hearing his name spoken by the man he was about to kill was surprisingly unpleasant. He furrowed his brow disdainfully. “You practically said it yourself: my hands are unclean.”

“But so are everyone’s. Even mine, though not directly. Aye, through my own idleness and folly, mine are the most bloodstained of all.” Henry sighed, casting his dark eyes downward, but a moment later he again looked steadily at Richard. “There is still hope for you. How can you speak of the mysterious workings of God’s mercy when you know nothing of them?”

“My lord, nothing you say can sway me from the task I’ve come to carry out,” Richard said sharply. “Deliver yourself up to the grace of God, but talk not to me of his mercy.”

He held the dagger aloft. The cold moonlight and the candle’s warm flame mingled together upon its polished blade, making it gleam like an otherworldly thing.

Suddenly, Henry raised one hand up and caught Richard by the hand that was holding the weapon. The deposed king was still kneeling, the point of the dagger still hung in the air far too close to his chest – yet there he was, holding his executioner by the wrist. It wasn’t a panicked gesture; Henry wasn’t trying to prevent the blow, and it wouldn’t have stopped the blade in any case. No, his hold on the young duke’s wrist was gentle. The gesture was akin to a saint softly accosting a sinner on the path to hell, not in an attempt to get him to stop or turn back, but merely to remind him of a long-forgotten notion.

“Let me go,” Richard growled.

He knew that what he had just said was nonsense. If he wanted to, he could fling Henry’s hand aside, push him to the ground – he was nothing more than a feeble, aging man, after all – and finish the deed.

But Richard did none of this. In that moment – surreally locked hand-in-hand with the man whom he had come to kill, his knuckles white as he gripped the dagger’s jeweled hilt – Richard did not see a weak old man in front of him and did not feel his usual disdain for the House of Lancaster. At least that was not all he saw, not all he felt. He saw a man who, despite years of hardship and tragedy, had not lost faith, neither in God nor in humanity. A man who still retained a childlike earnestness in his pale worn face. A man whose hands could shelter a broken heart as easily as a wounded bird.

Richard dropped his dagger to the flagstones with a clang. He pulled his away, fist clenched, rubbing his wrist with his other hand as if Henry’s gentle touch had burned him. His own heartbeat was pounding in his ears. Henry stood up and reached out as if to comfort him, but Richard swatted him away, cringing from him like a cornered animal.

“God’s wounds, how can you be such a saint?” Richard said through clenched teeth. “You should hate me.”

“Yes,” Henry said. “I know I should hate the man who has come to kill me, who killed my only son, but –”

Richard’s pale eyes flashed. “That isn’t true,” he spat. “I slew him not. The prince died in battle. Anyone could have landed the final blow. His beaver was up and his standard was all in tatters – ‘twas only afterward, when the dead were laid out, that he was discovered.” He paused. “But whether I killed him or not, don’t think I do not rue his death. I had no quarrel with him.”

He was shocked to see tears welling up in Henry’s eyes. The sight reminded him – morbidly and perhaps even blasphemously – of a painting he had seen once while in exile in Burgundy, depicting Christ as the Man of Sorrows.

“Ah,” Henry whispered. “I know not why, but that brings me some comfort. To know that my boy was not taken captive. That he didn’t suffer. God be thanked.”

Something seemed to break in Henry, and he began to weep. Whether from relief or sorrow, Richard could not tell. Perhaps it was both.

Henry turned away, leaning against the altar, his shoulders shaking; he wept almost noiselessly, half-coherent and disconnected prayers issuing brokenly from his lips. He covered his face with one long, voluminous sleeve of his gown.

And suddenly Richard felt his heart flooded by something he was almost certain he had never felt before: pity. Regret, rue, grief so manic it boiled over into a white-hot wrath – all those emotions he knew well, and had experienced more than his fair share of, ever since the wars had descended on the realm and cleft his childhood into pieces. But he had never allowed himself to feel pity before. It was a dangerous feeling, pity. It could unravel a man’s resolve in a moment, tangle his wits into knots. And yet in that moment Richard hardly cared. In that moment he was alone in a prison cell with a man who had once been king, who had lost everything through cowardice and stubborn saintliness, who had nothing left, who didn’t even have the guts to hate his own murderer, who still foolishly kept on believing in love.

With an air of one leaping over a broken bridge across a dark abyss, Richard came closer to Henry and embraced him. There was no reason for hesitation any more. He held him tightly, so tightly that he could feel Henry’s heartbeat against his own chest. Henry put up no resistance; he leaned heavily against Richard’s small frame and let himself be held. Richard said nothing, not even _hush_ or _weep not_.

Henry pulled back from the embrace slightly and pressed his forehead to Richard’s. Tears were still streaming from his eyes, and his expression of strange, transcendent grief made him look almost radiant, almost like a martyr. Hardly knowing what he was doing, Richard cupped Henry’s face in his hands, trying to mimic the way Henry’s touch had felt on his wrist, unaccustomed though Richard was to softness. He wiped Henry’s tears away and pressed his lips to the trails they left on his face, tasting a faint tang of salt. He did it again. And again. He felt Henry touch his hands, his arms, his face, his shoulders, holding Richard close as if the two of them were the last men on earth, as if Judgment Day had come early and all around them the world was burning.

“Forgive me,” Richard whispered, his voice threatening to break. “Forgive me.”

Henry murmured something that Richard could not quite hear. Something about God. And love.

The candle on the altar was dying; the moon had disappeared under a cloud.

*

Richard did not wish to think on what happened next. He tried to blot it from his memory, but still the images remained in his mind like bloodstains on cloth.

Henry crossing himself and raising his eyes to heaven. Henry smiling serenely like an angel on an altarpiece. Henry sinking to the ground and dying with his eyes open. Richard closing them with a touch of his fingers. Richard arranging Henry’s body, laying his hands over his still heart. Richard struggling to clean and sheath the dagger with violently shaking hands. The blood pooling on the flagstones. The crucified Christ gazing upon the murdered king with unseeing eyes. The candle on the altar going out.

A chill wind, uncharacteristically harsh for May, battered Richard from all sides as he left the Tower. The moon was out again, making silver lights play upon the water. Eventually the wind subsided and Richard stepped into the boat that would take him back to the heart of the city, to the court, to the place where his loyalties would lie forever. And he would welcome it all with open arms.

The night was gentle; the night was kind.


End file.
